Windows gallery

I used to import and tag all my photos (7000 in total) and they appeared beautifully tagged and catalogued in windows Gallery (Windows Vista).
All this seems to have gone and sorting by tag in file view only sorts in folders not in total.
Also I used Windows picture manager which opened in Windows gallery to crop and alter brightness/contrast. This also appears to have gone!
I can import picture to WORD and manipulate them there beautifully, but when I save as jpeg file it does not save any cropping that I have done.
Help! Have I got to buy Photoshop application?

If you want a good free program that provides all sorts of photo manipulation including cropping, brightness, sharpness, framing, adding text etc, have a look at Photoscape. Another very useful program for dealing with images is IrfanView